Step by Step in Esperanto

STEP BY STEP IN ESPERANTO

A TEXTBOOK FOR ENGLISH-SPEAKING STUDENTS

FOR CLASS TEACHING OR HOME STUDY

WITH GRADUATED READING MATTER, NUMEROUS EXERCISES, AND INDEX

Montagu C. Butler

Member, Royal Society of Teachers

9th Edition, 1991 ISBN 0-93975-01-3 (Previous ISBN 0-85230-071-9)

Published by Esperanto League for North America, Inc. P.O. Box 1129, E1 Cerrito CA 94530 U.S.A.

"The teacher must not be too ambitious to get, for instance, all the forms of a verb collected... all at once: it is not necessary: one tense at a time is quite sufficient. And of course one must not be such a slave to traditional grammatical systems, that one necessarily must go all the way through one class of words before beginning another. There is no reason why these bits of system should not be taken up quite unsystematically; one day a little about pronouns, another day the present tense of verbs, a third day the comparison of adjectives... Each phenomenon which is taken up should, however, be treated with as much thoroughness as possible at that standpoint... One thing at a time, and that done well!^w

Otto Jespersen, in 'How to teach a Foreign Language', p. 129.

Copyright © 1991 Esperanto League for North America, Inc.

Preface

On the appearance of this book I received various suggestions for its improvement. I was advised to omit, among other things, all stories about mothers-in-law (as giving a wrong outlook on life, and treating a serious subject with levity); the story of the cannibal who ate his wife (as immoral—perhaps the reader might go and do likevvise); all puns (as confusing); all jokes of any kind whatsoever (as undignined); all English verse (as doggerel); all Esperanto verse (as waste of space); all translation exercises (as inadvisable for beginners); all proverbs (as obscure); every word exemplifying the vowe!-sounds in which the vovvel is not followed by the letter " r " (as misleading); and every word in which it is so follovved (for the same reason). One friend regretted the inclusion of illustrative sentences from the Ekzercaro (as hackneyed); another advised the omission of all sentences not in the Ekzercaro (as not authoritative). A Scottish correspondent urged the publication of an expurgated edition, labelled ° For Sale in Scotlandwhich should omit all reference to a certain insect apparently unknovvn in that country, though otherwise sufhciently international. Some complained that there were not enough exer- cises; others, that there were too many. The exercises given were condemned by one as too simple (because they leave nothing to the learner's intelligence); by another as too difficult (because they call for thought, and the average learner does not think). One said " Make more use of varied type, to help the eye another: ⁴⁴ Your use of varied type is excessive, and offends the eye.^M I vvas told by one that the book was pedantically Zamenhofan; by another, that no one could accuse it of making any attempt to follow Zamenhof. Complaints that it teaches too much (or too little); that it has no grammar (or too much); and that it contains no home-work, no reading-matter, no chapters, no index, and no table of correlatives, I record, and leave.

Several friends advised me to scrap the whole book and rewrite it on entirely different lines. Unfortunately, the various plans suggested were mutually exclusive. One critic wrote " The book is too diffuse another: " It suffers throughout from over-compression Still another asked: " Why write any book at all, seeing that the whole grammar of the language may be put on a postcard, and its prin- ciples grasped in a few minutes ?